Beyond the World's End

Shola von Reinhold's decadent queer literary debut immerses readers in the pursuit of aesthetics and beauty, while interrogating the removal and obscuring of Black figures from history.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the "Bright Young Things," the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the '20s and '30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists' residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the '30s. The artists' residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda's "Escapes" through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.

Shola von Reinhold is a Scottish socialite and writer. Shola has been published in the Cambridge Literary Review, The Stockholm Review, was Cove Park's Scottish Emerging Writer 2018 and recently won a Dewar Award for Literature. Shola is a recent graduate from the Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow which was completed through the Jessica Yorke Writing Scholarship and has previously studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Shola has also written for publications including i-D, AnOther Magazine.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making.

The experiment of the one hundred word constraint, each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long, amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground.

What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? 

The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

A queering of psychoanalysis put together by the forerunner of Inactual Magazine. 

Organ Multiplication Manifesto is an essay that delves into the transformations of sociality and sexuality in the context of digital technologies. Using an interdisciplinary approach that blends philosophy, erotic literature, media theory, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and neuroscience, the text explores how devices, platforms, and technologies shape and produce normative systems that influence our perceptions, desires, and relationships with others. By examining the interplay between desire and digital mediation and drawing comparisons with authors such as Deleuze, Ballard, Žižek, Butler, Preciado, Bataille, and others, this book aims to present a new theoretical, critical, and philosophical perspective in the contemporary discourse on the relationship between humans, technology, and society.

This book begins with an analysis of three iconic erotic texts from Masoch, Ballard and Bataille, and uses this analysis as the departure point for its main theoretical work on the four topics listed in the subtitle. The book passes through a lot of interesting phases, including an analysis of Phenomenology and Gucci, class struggle and OnlyFans and much more, until eventually arriving at the actual manifesto for Organ Multiplication and the beautifully named notion of the "Caged Sun". 

Foreword by Vincenzo Estremo.
Afterword by Franco "Bifo" Berardi.

"One may think that the history of the human culture is going to be enormously impoverished by the disappearance of the body, one may think that, on the contrary, human culture has been enriched by the renounce to presence and physical contact. It is not the intention of Damato to save this dilemma, His intention is rather to open a new field of investigation, and possibly to start a reflection on a more advanced dilemma: will the change of perception make possible the emergence of a new ontology, or is the disappearance of the body going to mark the final dissolution of human life itself?" — Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Christian Nirvana Damato is a writer, curator, and independent researcher working in the fields of philosophy, technology, psychoanalysis, and visual culture. He teaches media theory at the IED in Turin and runs various workshops on publishing and writing. He writes for and collaborates with various magazines and publishing houses. He is the founder and editorial director of Inactual. He has also published Medial Disorders. Interpretive and Non-statistical Compendium of Technological Disorders. Vol I, with contributions by Geert Lovink, Alfie Bown, Isabel Millar, Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) et al. (ed. by, Inactual, 2024), Wearable Statistical Desires. Re-programming the performativity of the body through digisexuality (Mimesis 2025; Everyday Analysis, 2025) and Medial Disorders Vol II.

In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed.

Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere.

Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.

First launched in 2012, and published by mfc michèle didier (micheledidier.com), == is a small-run arts publication, edited by Matt Keegan. ==#2, 2015, is designed by Su Barber and published in an edition of 500 by Capricious Publishing. Barber and Keegan worked together on North Drive Press (northdrivepress.com) between 2005-2010, and this publication shares a variety of traits with NDP.

==#2 is a non-thematic arts publication contained in a box with a 96-page bound volume featuring artist-to-artist interviews, texts, and transcriptions. Six loose multiples are also included.

Contributors include: Sam Anderson, Uri Aran, Fia Backström, Darren Bader, Judith Barry, Stefania Bortolami, Daniel Bozhkov, Milano Chow, Anna Craycroft, Lucky DeBellevue, Cristina Delgado, Haytham El-Wardany, Jake Ewert, Vincent Fecteau, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Harrell Fletcher, Rachel Foullon, Aurélien Froment, Kenny Greenberg, Calla Henkel, Leslie Hewitt, Jaya Howey, Adelita Husni-Bey, Iman Issa, Ruba Katrib, Jill Magid, Jo Nigoghossian, Aaron Peck, Max Pitegoff, David Placek, Olivia Plender, Lisa Robertson, Andrew Russeth, Amy Sillman, Diane Simpson, Greg Parma Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Martine Syms, and Anicka Yi.

Petrit Halilaj and Danh Vo in conversation; Forensic Architecture (Eyal Weizman, Nour Abuzaid, and Elizabeth Breiner); Gabrielle Goliath; Edward W. Said; Shumon Basar; Dani Blanga Gubbay; Yvonne Rainer; Thomas Eggerer and Jochen Klein; Tobias Pils; Travis Jeppesen...

Collective intelligence (along with its wildly popular counterpart, brain rot) is a recurring subject of late. This issue is woven together through reflections on methodologies of the collective, larger-than-ourselves dynamics and "what goes unuttered (of, perhaps, what is painfully unutterable)," as Zoé Samudzi writes about Gabrielle Goliath—whose project for the South African pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale has been cancelled by the Arts and Culture Minister of her country for being "divisive." We stand in solidarity with the artist. Forensic Architecture's Eyal Weizman speaks of new ways of detecting "hyper-relations" as strategies to confront systemic violence. Edward W. Said, in his crucial 1993 essay "Speaking Truth to Power" (reprinted here), argues that "the intellectual's voice is lonely, but it has resonance because it associates itself freely with [. . .] the common pursuit of a shared ideal." And in our Curators section, Shumon Basar memetically reaffirms that now more than ever, "Comment is king."
Let's not shy away from commenting.

This issue comes with different covers, randomly distributed.

Exhibitions by Edgar Calel and Forensic Architecture, conversations with Lisette Lagnado and between Eyal Weizman, Agata Nguyen Chuong, Zoé Samudzi and Irmgard Emmelhainz, and short stories by Portia Subran and Rémy Ngamije.

Forensic Architecture presents ‘A Counter-Archive of the Ovaherero and Nama Genocide’, a powerful investigation into the early 20th-century genocide committed by German colonial powers in today’s Namibia. Drawing on years of archival research and spatial analysis, the exhibition traces the lasting impact of colonial violence in three parts: from the ideological roots of racialised imperialism, to the design of the concentration camp, to the ongoing environmental degradation and dispossession affecting Indigenous communities today.

Edgar Calel’s ‘Dreams and memories dazzle through the flickering of fireflies’ is an exploration of dreams, memory and everyday life within his multi-generational family home in Comalapa, Guatemala. Each morning, dreams are shared among family members, as a practical and poetical way to sense the energy of the day ahead. Concrete business plans and reminders to cook certain dishes emerge from these retellings: a ritual so entwined in the architecture of their every day, that, even when apart, they recount their visions through shared voice notes.

Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.

How queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state.

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State offers a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew engagement with democratic theorizing, the historian Samuel Clowes Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives.

Samuel Clowes Huneke is assistant professor of history at George Mason University. His first book, States of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), won the Charles E. Smith Award for best book in European History from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Huneke has written for Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. 

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.  

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.  

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

"Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!” — John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition? Montgomery and bergman call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into social movements, posing as the “correct” way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of political currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone.

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, and more.